Truth was an early victim in the battle against tobacco. The big lie, repeated ad nauseam in anti-tobacco circles, is that smoking causes more than 400,000 premature deaths each year in the United States. That mantra is the principal justification for all manner of tobacco regulations and legislation, not to mention lawsuits by dozens of states for Medicaid recovery, class actions by seventy-five to eighty union health funds, similar litigation by thirty-five Blue Cross plans, twenty-four class suits by smokers who are not yet ill, sixty class actions by allegedly ill smokers, five hundred suits for damages from secondhand smoke, and health-related litigation by twelve cities and counties - an explosion of adjudication never before experienced in this country or elsewhere.

The war on smoking started with a kernel of truth - that cigarettes are a high risk factor for lung cancer - but has grown into a monster of deceit and greed, eroding the credibility of government and subverting the rule of law. Junk science has replaced honest science and propaganda parades as fact. Our legislators and judges, in need of dispassionate analysis, are instead smothered by an avalanche of statistics - tendentious, inadequately documented, and unchecked by even rudimentary notions of objectivity. Meanwhile, Americans are indoctrinated by health "professionals" bent on imposing their lifestyle choices on the rest of us and brainwashed by politicians eager to tap the deep pockets of a pariah industry.

The aim of this paper is to dissect the granddaddy of all tobacco lies - that smoking causes 400,000 deaths each year. To set the stage, let's look at two of the many exaggerations, misstatements, and outright fabrications that have dominated the tobacco debate from the outset.

Third-rate thinking about second-hand smoke

"Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer, Do Not Let Them Fool You," states the headline of a March 1998 press release from the World Health Organization. The release begins by noting that WHO had been accused of suppressing its own study because it "failed to scientifically prove that there is an association between passive smoking . . . and a number of diseases, lung cancer in particular." Not true, insisted WHO. Smokers themselves are not the only ones who suffer health problems because of their habit; secondhand smoke can be fatal as well.

The press release went on to report that WHO researchers found "an estimated 16 percent increased risk of lung cancer among nonsmoking spouses of smokers. For workplace exposure the estimated increase in risk was 17 percent." Remarkably, the very next line warned: "Due to small sample size, neither increased risk was statistically significant." Contrast that conclusion with the hype in the headline: "Passive Smoking Does Cause Lung Cancer." Spoken often enough, the lie becomes its own evidence.

The full study would not see the light of day for seven more months, until October 1998, when it was finally published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. News reports omitted any mention of statistical insignificance. Instead, they again trumpeted relative risks of 1.16 and 1.17, corresponding to 16 and 17 percent increases, as if those ratios were meaningful. Somehow lost in WHO's media blitz was the National Cancer Institute's own guideline: "Relative risks of less than 2 [that is, a 100 percent increase] are considered small. . . . Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident." To put the WHO results in their proper perspective, note that the relative risk of lung cancer for persons who drink whole milk is 2.4. That is, the increased risk of contracting lung cancer from whole milk is 140 percent - more than eight times the 17 percent increase from secondhand smoke.

What should have mattered most to government officials, the health community and concerned parents is the following pronouncement from the WHO study: After examining 650 lung cancer patients and 1,500 healthy adults in seven European countries, WHO concluded that the "results indicate no association between childhood exposure to environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer risk."

EPA's Junk Science

Another example of anti-tobacco misinformation is the landmark 1993 report in which the Environmental Protection Agency declared that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) is a dangerous carcinogen that kills three thousand Americans yearly. Five years later, in July 1998, federal judge William L. Osteen lambasted the EPA for "cherry picking" the data, excluding studies that "demonstrated no association between ETS and cancer," and withholding "significant portions of its findings and reasoning in striving to confirm its a priori hypothesis." Both "the record and EPA's explanation," concluded the court, "make it clear that using standard methodology, EPA could not produce statistically significant results." A more damning assessment is difficult to imagine, but here are the court's conclusions at greater length, in its own words.

EPA publicly committed to a conclusion before research had begun; excluded industry [input thereby] violating the [Radon Research] Act's procedural requirements; adjusted established procedure and scientific norms to validate the Agency's public conclusion, and aggressively utilized the Act's authority to disseminate findings to establish a de facto regulatory scheme intended to restrict Plaintiff's products and to influence public opinion. In conducting the ETS Risk Assessment, EPA disregarded information and made findings on selective information; did not disseminate significant epidemiologic information; deviated from its Risk Assessment Guidelines; failed to disclose important findings and reasoning; and left significant questions without answers. EPA's conduct left substantial holes in the administrative record. While so doing, EPA produced limited evidence, then claimed the weight of the Agency's research evidence demonstrated ETS causes Cancer. [Flue-Cured Tobacco Coop. Stabilization Corp. v. United States Environmental Protection Agency, 4 F. Supp. 2d 435, 465-66 (M.D.N.C. 1998)]

Hundreds of states, cities, and counties have banned indoor smoking - many in reaction to the EPA report. California even prohibits smoking in bars. According to Matthew L. Myers, general counsel of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, "the release of the original risk assessment gave an enormous boost to efforts to restrict smoking." Now that the study has been thoroughly debunked, one would think that many of the bans would be lifted. Don't hold your breath. When science is adulterated and debased for political ends, the culprits are unlikely to reverse course merely because they have been unmasked.

In reaction to the federal court's criticism EPA administrator Carol M. Browner said, "It's so widely accepted that secondhand smoke causes very real problems for kids and adults. Protecting people from the health hazards of secondhand smoke should be a national imperative." Like Alice in Wonderland, sentence first, evidence afterward. Browner reiterates: "We believe the health threats . . . from breathing secondhand smoke are very real." Never mind science; it is Browner's beliefs that control. The research can be suitably tailored.

For the EPA to alter results, disregard evidence, and adjust its procedures and standards to satisfy agency prejudices is unacceptable behavior, even to a first-year science student. Those criticisms are about honesty, carefulness, and rigor - the very essence of science.

Classifying diseases as smoke-related

With that record of distortion, it should come as no surprise that anti-tobacco crusaders misrepresent the number of deaths due to smoking. Start by considering the diseases that are incorrectly classified as smoking-related. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prepares and distributes information on smoking-attributable mortality, morbidity and economic costs (SAMMEC). In its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report for 27 August 1993, the CDC states that 418,690 Americans died in 1990 of various diseases that they contracted because, according to the government, they smoked.

Diseases are categorized as smoking-related if the risk of death for smokers exceeds that for nonsmokers. In the jargon of epidemiology, a relative risk that is greater than 1 indicates a connection between exposure (smoking) and effect (death). Recall, however, the National Cancer Institute's guideline: "Relative risks of less than two are considered small. . . . Such increases may be due to chance, statistical bias, or effects of confounding factors that are sometimes not evident." And the Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence confirms that the threshold test for legal significance is a relative risk of two or higher. At any ratio below two, the results are insufficiently reliable to conclude that a particular agent (e.g., tobacco) caused a particular disease.

What would happen if the SAMMEC data were to exclude deaths from those diseases that had a relative risk of less than two for current or former smokers? Table 1 shows that 163,071 deaths reported by CDC were from diseases that should not have been included in the report. Add to that another 1,362 deaths from burn injuries - unless one believes that Philip Morris is responsible when a smoker falls asleep with a lit cigarette. That is a total of 164,433 misreported deaths out of 418,690. When the report is properly limited to diseases that have a significant relationship with smoking, the death total declines to 254,257. Thus, on this count alone, SAMMEC overstates the number of deaths by 65 percent.

Calculating Excess Deaths

But there is more. Writing on "Risk Attribution and Tobacco-Related Deaths" in the 1993 American Journal of Epidemiology, T. D. Sterling, W. L. Rosenbaum, and J. J. Weinkam expose another overstatement - exceeding 65 percent - that flows from using the American Cancer Society's Cancer Prevention Survey (CPS) as a baseline against which excess deaths are computed. Here is how one government agency, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), calculates the number of deaths caused by smoking: The OTA first determines the death rate for persons who were part of the CPS sample and never smoked. Next, that rate is applied to the total U.S. population in order to estimate the number of Americans who would have died if no one ever smoked. Finally, the hypothetical number of deaths for assumed never-smokers is subtracted from the actual number of U.S. deaths, and the difference is ascribed to smoking. That approach seems reasonable if one important condition is satisfied: The CPS sample must be roughly the same as the overall U.S. population with respect to those factors, other than smoking, that could be associated with the death rate. But as Sterling, Rosenbaum, and Weinkam point out, nothing could be further from the truth.

The American Cancer Society bases its CPS study on a million men and women volunteers, drawn from the ranks of the Society's members, friends, and acquaintances. The persons who participate are more affluent than average, overwhelmingly white, married, college graduates, who generally do not have hazardous jobs. Each of those characteristics tends to reduce the death rate of the CPS sample which, as a result, enjoys an average life expectancy that is substantially longer than the typical American enjoys.

Because OTA starts with an atypically low death rate for never-smokers in the CPS sample, then applies that rate to the whole population, its baseline for determining excess deaths is grossly underestimated. By comparing actual deaths with a baseline that is far too low, OTA creates the illusion that a large number of deaths are due to smoking.

That same illusion pervades the statistics released by the U.S. Surgeon General, who in his 1989 report estimated that 335,600 deaths were caused by smoking. When Sterling, Rosenbaum, and Weinkam recalculated the Surgeon General's numbers, replacing the distorted CPS sample with a more representative baseline from large surveys conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, they found that the number of smoking-related deaths declined to 203,200. Thus, the Surgeon General's report overstated the number of deaths by more than 65 percent simply by choosing the wrong standard of comparison.

Sterling and his coauthors report that not only is the death rate considerably lower for the CPS sample than for the entire U.S. but, astonishingly, even smokers in the CPS sample have a lower death rate than the national average for both smokers and nonsmokers. As a result, if OTA were to have used the CPS death rate for smokers, applied that rate to the total population, then subtracted the actual number of deaths for all Americans, it would have found that smoking saves 277,621 lives each year. The authors caution, of course, that their calculation is sheer nonsense, not a medical miracle. Those "lives would be saved only if the U.S. population would die with the death rate of smokers in the affluent CPS sample." Unhappily, the death rate for Americans is considerably higher than that for the CPS sample.

Comment: Given all we know about the benefits of smoking, we wonder if the results extend further, and that smoking actually extends lifespan?

Nearly as disturbing, researchers like Sterling, Rosenbaum, and Weinkam identified that statistical predicament many years ago; yet the government persists in publishing data on smoking-related deaths that are known to be greatly inflated.

Comment: It's neither a "statistical predicament" nor a "medical miracle": the plain truth is that smoking is beneficial!

Even if actual deaths were compared against an appropriate baseline for nonsmokers, the excess deaths could not properly be attributed to smoking alone. It cannot be assumed that the only difference between smokers and nonsmokers is that the former smoke. The two groups are dissimilar in many other respects, some of which affect their propensity to contract diseases that have been identified as smoking-related. For instance, smokers have higher rates of alcoholism, exercise less on average, eat fewer green vegetables, are more likely to be exposed to workplace carcinogens, and are poorer than nonsmokers. Each of those factors can be a "cause" of death from a so-called smoking-related disease; and each must be statistically controlled for if the impact of a single factor, like smoking, is to be reliably determined.

Sterling, Rosenbaum, and Weinkam found that adjusting their calculations for just two lifestyle differences - in income and alcohol consumption - between smokers and nonsmokers had the effect of reducing the Surgeon General's smoking-related death count still further, from 203,200 to 150,000. That means the combined effect of using a proper standard of comparison coupled with controls for income and alcohol was to lower the Surgeon General's estimate 55 percent - from 335,600 to 150,000. Thus, the original estimate was a disquieting 124 percent too high, even without adjustments for important variables like occupation, exercise, and nutritional habits.

What if smokers got plenty of exercise and had healthy diets while nonsmokers were couch potatoes who consumed buckets of fast food? Naturally, there are some smokers and nonsmokers who satisfy those criteria. Dr. William E. Wecker, a consulting statistician who has testified for the tobacco industry, scanned the CPS database and found thousands of smokers with relatively low risk factors and thousands of never-smokers with high risk factors. Comparing the mortality rates of the two groups, Dr. Wecker discovered that the smokers were "healthier and die less often by a factor of three than the never-smokers." Obviously, other risk factors matter, and any study that ignores them is utterly worthless.

Yet, if a smoker who is obese; has a family history of high cholesterol, diabetes, and heart problems; and never exercises dies of a heart attack, the government attributes his death to smoking alone. That procedure, if applied to the other causal factors identified in the CPS study, would produce more than twice as many "attributed" deaths as there are actual deaths, according to Dr. Wecker. For example, the same calculations that yield 400,000 smoking-related deaths suggest that 504,000 people die each year because they engage in little or no exercise. Employing an identical formula, bad nutritional habits can be shown to account for 649,000 excess deaths annually. That is nearly 1.6 million deaths from only three causes - without considering alcoholism, accidents, poverty, etc. - out of 2.3 million deaths in 1995 from all causes combined. And on it goes - computer-generated phantom deaths, not real deaths - constrained neither by accepted statistical methods, by common sense, nor by the number of people who die each year.

Adjusting for age of death

Next and last, we turn to a different sort of deceit - one pertaining not to the number of smoking-related deaths but rather to the misperception that those deaths are somehow associated with kids and young adults. For purposes of this discussion, we will work with the far-fetched statistics published by CDC - an annual average from 1990 through 1994 of 427,743 deaths attributable to tobacco. Is the problem as serious as it sounds?

At first blush, it would seem that more than 400,000 annual deaths is an extremely serious problem. But suppose that all of the people died at age ninety-nine. Surely then, the seriousness of the problem would be tempered by the fact that the decedents would have died soon from some other cause in any event. That is not far from the truth: while tobacco does not kill people at an average age of ninety-nine, it does kill people at an average age of roughly seventy-two - far closer to ninety-nine than to childhood or even young adulthood. Indeed, according to a 1991 RAND study, smoking "reduces the life expectancy of a twenty-year-old by about 4.3 years" - not a trivial concern to be sure, but not the horror that is sometimes portrayed.

Comment: How can we take seriously ANY data provided by "scientists" who have no compunction about cooking the data and lying through their teeth?

Consider Table 2, which shows the number of deaths and age at death for various causes of death: The three nonsmoking categories total nearly 97,000 deaths - probably not much different than the correctly calculated number of smoking-related deaths - but the average age at death is only thirty-nine. As contrasted with a seventy-two-year life expectancy for smokers, each of those nonsmoking deaths snuffs out thirty-three years of life - our most productive years, from both an economic and child-rearing perspective.

Perhaps that is why the Carter Center's "Closing the Gap" project at Emory University examined "years of potential life lost" (YPLL) for selected diseases, to identify those causes of death that were of greatest severity and consequence. The results were reported by R.W. Amler and D.L. Eddins, "Cross-Sectional Analysis: Precursors of Premature Death in the United States," in the 1987 American Journal of Preventive Medicine. First, the authors determined for each disease the annual number of deaths by age group. Second, they multiplied for each age group the number of deaths times the average number of years remaining before customary retirement at age sixty-five. Then they computed YPLL by summing the products for each disease across age groups.

Thus, if smoking were deemed to have killed, say, fifty thousand people from age sixty through sixty-four, a total of 150,000 years of life were lost in that age group - i.e., fifty thousand lives times an average of three years remaining to age sixty-five. YPLL for smoking would be the accumulation of lost years for all age groups up to sixty-five.

Amler and Eddins identified nine major precursors of preventable deaths. Measured by YPLL, tobacco was about halfway down the list - ranked four out of nine in terms of years lost - not "the number one killer in America" as alarmists have exclaimed. Table 3 shows the four most destructive causes of death, based on 1980 YPLL statistics. Bear in mind that the starting point for the YPLL calculation is the number of deaths, which for tobacco is grossly magnified for all of the reasons discussed above.

According to Amler and Eddins, even if we were to look at medical treatment - measured by days of hospital care - nonalcohol-related injuries impose a 58 percent greater burden than tobacco, and nutrition-related diseases are more burdensome as well. Another statistic that more accurately reflects the real health repercussions of smoking is the age distribution of the 427,743 deaths that CDC mistakenly traces to tobacco. No doubt most readers will be surprised to learn that - aside from burn victims and pediatric diseases - tobacco does not kill a single person below the age of 35.

Each year from 1990 through 1994, as shown in Table 4, only 1,910 tobacco-related deaths - less than half of 1 percent of the total - were persons below age thirty-five. Of those, 319 were burn victims and the rest were infants whose parents smoked. But the relationship between parental smoking and pediatric diseases carries a risk ratio of less than 2, and thus is statistically insignificant. Unless better evidence is produced, those deaths should not be associated with smoking.

On the other hand, the National Center for Health Statistics reports that more than twenty-one thousand persons below age thirty-five died from motor vehicle accidents in 1992, more than eleven thousand died from suicide, and nearly seventeen thousand died from homicide. Over half of those deaths were connected with alcohol or drug abuse. That should put smoking-related deaths in a somewhat different light.

Most revealing of all, almost 255,000 of the smoking-related deaths - nearly 60 percent of the total - occurred at age seventy or above. More than 192,000 deaths - nearly 45 percent of the total - occurred at age seventy-five or higher. And roughly 72,000 deaths - almost 17 percent of the total - occurred at the age of 85 or above. Still, the public health community disingenuously refers to "premature" deaths from smoking, as if there is no upper age limit to the computation.

The vast overestimate of the dangers of smoking has had disastrous results for the health of young people. Risky behavior does not exist in a vacuum; people compare uncertainties and apportion their time, effort, and money according to the perceived severity of the risk. Each year, alcohol and drug abuse kills tens of thousands of people under the age of thirty-five. Yet according to a 1995 survey by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, high school seniors thought smoking a pack a day was more dangerous than daily consumption of four to five alcoholic beverages or using barbiturates. And the CDC reports that the number of pregnant women who drank frequently quadrupled between 1991 and 1995 - notwithstanding that fetal alcohol syndrome is the largest cause of preventable mental retardation, occurring in one out of every one thousand births.

Can anyone doubt that the drumbeat of anti-smoking propaganda from the White House and the health establishment has deluded Americans into thinking that tobacco is the real danger to our children? In truth, alcohol and drug abuse poses an immensely greater risk and anti-smoking zealots bear a heavy burden for their duplicity.

Conclusion

The unvarnished fact is that children do not die of tobacco-related diseases, correctly determined. If they smoke heavily during their teens, they may die of lung cancer in their old age, fifty or sixty years later, assuming lung cancer is still a threat then.

Meanwhile, do not expect consistency or even common sense from public officials. Alcoholism contributes to crime, violence, spousal abuse, and child neglect. Children are dying by the thousands in accidents, suicides, and homicides. But states go to war against nicotine - which is not an intoxicant, has no causal connection with crime, and poses little danger to young adults or family members.

The campaign against cigarettes is not entirely dishonest. After all, a seasoning of truth makes the lie more digestible. Evidence does suggest that cigarettes substantially increase the risk of lung cancer, bronchitis, and emphysema. The relationship between smoking and other diseases is not nearly so clear, however; and the scare-mongering that has passed for science is appalling. Not only is tobacco far less pernicious than Americans are led to believe, but its destructive effect is amplified by all manner of statistical legerdemain - counting diseases that should not be counted, using the wrong sample as a standard of comparison, and failing to control for obvious confounding variables.

To be blunt, there is no credible evidence that 400,000 deaths per year - or any number remotely close to 400,000 - are caused by tobacco. Nor has that estimate been adjusted for the positive effects of smoking - less obesity, colitis, depression, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and, for some women, a lower incidence of breast cancer. The actual damage from smoking is neither known nor knowable with precision. Responsible statisticians agree that it is impossible to attribute causation to a single variable, like tobacco, when there are multiple causal factors that are correlated with one another. The damage from cigarettes is far less than it is made out to be.

Most important, the government should stop lying and stop pretending that smoking-related deaths are anything but a statistical artifact. The unifying bond of all science is that truth is its aim. When that goal yields to politics, tainting science in order to advance predetermined ends, we are all at risk. Sadly, that is exactly what has transpired as our public officials fabricate evidence to promote their crusade against big tobacco.

Robert A. Levy is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center where he teaches "Statistics for Lawyers." Rosalind B. Marimont is a mathematician and scientist now retired after a 37-year career with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (formerly the Bureau of Standards) and the National Institute of Health.

Comment: The real cause of death is staring you in the face on your breakfast table every morning and on your TV screens every evening. Gluten, dairy, excessive carbohydrate consumption, nuclear testing, war, artificial famine, manufactured economic crises, proven killers all of them, not statistical lies... how much more stress can you take until you see that those who would convince you that smoking is killing you are blowing smoke rings around your brain?

Reader Comments

Well if you burn anything it will give off gasses and other bad things.So if you eat it you will not get any of the bad things coming from it.Vaporizing is even better then smoking a joint.You dont actually burn it using a vaporizer,all you are doing there is releasing the cannabinoids and terpens not actually burning the pot material,so hence none of the extra stuff being released.A bong doesnt make much if any difference there either other then filtering the big pieces and cooling the smoke.The smoke is where all the bad stuff is.
So I would say make brownies and cookies and butter if you dont want to smoke it.
It may not be right but thats what I have gone by for years and years and Im a daily smoker.Look around on different forums you should find about the same thing there.Marijuana forums have a lot of good articles in them from other ppl that are willing to share their knowledge.
But hey Im a nobody.

The above title is now my offcial title in War on Tobacco. Recently i was waiting for a friend on a bar terrace, having a beer and a ciggie. Friend was late so i called him and told him to hurry up, wind has started and it's getting a bit chilly. He said "well get inside the bar". Immediatelly, it flashed before my eyes: my new official title. I said "I'm a smoking fundamentalist. I don't enter non-smoking spaces".

So does Washington state. Bars, restaurants -- all businesses and all government buildings, too.

It's against the law to smoke within 25 feet of any door of any building, except for residences. In theory, if one were smoking in one's own car, with the windows closed, waiting at a red light, and if he were within 25 feet of such a door, he could be cited.

The irony is that engine exhaust escaping a vehicle is legal and that tobacco smoke not escaping a car is illegal!

The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remains president and CEO, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the second largest privately held company (after Cargill) by revenue in the United States.

Who are the 20% corporate funders? Who are the 80% individuals?
I would like to see the medical/health industry given a chance for a right of reply upon this blog. I am shocked at the claims of no statistically meaningful evidence of serious health issues related to smoking.
There again, if one is to take the report's measure of up to 100% greater incidence as being not statistically meaningful, that might explain the weird conclusions.
I am sorry, I request a second opinion.

This is a tired old subterfuge that probably won't fly here. It is the message, not the messenger that matters. The data utilized was compiled from published "science" and the highly questionable statistics of the anti-smoking organizations. This article simply deconstructs it to arrive at its more than rational conclusions. If you can refute the conclusions with facts, please do so. Then your reluctance to accept these conclusions will have some basis in objectivity. The medical/health industry is free to visit this site and refute all they want. Send them a note.

the anti-smoking agenda has always been about politics and has nothing to do with health .... I remember the original research conducted in the seventies and they couldn't induce lung cancer in clinical trials ... the one element they did incidentally test was exposure to diesel fumes, that was a proven cause of lung cancer ... but you will never find any cancer warning in any petrol station

Of course, I cannot supply refuting evidence, I am only an observer. But if this post was published in the MSM you would soon see plenty of opposing responses from the medical people and citizens who have prematurely lost family and friends, smokers, from lung cancer, throat cancer and heart disease.
You seem to have no understanding of the difference in general health levels of smokers compared to non-smokers. I am 71 and have seen a great deal.
This is personal experience I am talking about. I would venture to suggest that most of you younger smokers will see my viewpoint by the time you are say, 50. Maybe my advice could save your life? Think about it!
Talk to your doctor, maybe.

Being 71 is quite an accomplishment, and I'm sure you -have- seen a great deal. Statistics are a tricky subject, however, and numbers can dance to the statistician's tune, as is shown by the -incorrect- study correlating saturated fat intake to cardiovascular disease. Someone your age is, no doubt, familiar with the "snake oil salesman". People are gullible, and will grab at any chance to demonize something, find something to blame for their woes. In this case, it's the lung cancer, throat cancer, and heart disease.

My father-in-law had esophageal cancer, and never smoked a day in his life...it turns out the cause was -probably- flavoring oils added to his coffee beans. God knows what was in -that-. And what better way to explain why non-smokers have slightly higher risk of cancer than to blame it on second-hand smoke, rather than the probably correct conclusion that smoking increases mucous production in the lungs, -preventing- ingestion of radioactive particles from surface nuclear testing, and non-smokers are not provided that extra protection?

As far as talking to a doctor, he's been programmed by the same system that's coming up with the anti-smoking campaign. Why would I go to him for the truth? The last doctor my wife went to said she was GOING TO BE DEAD IN 5 YEARS if she didn't stop smoking. Not only was that unprofessional, it was incorrect, rude, and I almost punched him in the face. No truth to be found there.

TJ, you are only 4 years older than I. I have smoked for 53 years, only in the last 15 years have I smoked non-additive or organic tobaccos. Prior to that I was a Marlboro consumer. I was part of my employer's health study of the smokers in our company (we were the largest manufacturer of vitamin C products in the US). We all went to the UCLA Cardio Center in Torrance, CA for complete MRI scans. There were 7 smokers involved, and one non-smoker. The doctors were not aware of the nature of our study, so as to not bias the conclusions. When the doctors reviewed my scan with me, they noted that there was a bit of scar tissue on one of my lungs. I told them that I had had a very bad case of pneumonia several years prior, and they agreed that this was consistent with that. My arterial calcium (plaque) score was 7, which is barely quantifiable. I was deemed, cardio vascular-wise, as fit as a teen athlete. When I told them that I was a 40+ year smoker, their jaws dropped. The non-smoker in our group was sent, literally, straight to the hospital for multiple bypass surgery.

My grandparents, parents and aunts and uncles on both sides have all made it to at least 80+, the vast majority were long time smokers. The one exception was a non-smoking aunt on my mother's side who died of cancer in her 60s. My father died of pancreatic cancer at 85. He smoked for over 60 years. He was also in the first wave of occupying Marines to land in Nagasaki, a few weeks after the bomb.

If you were familiar with the past work of this website you would be aware that about 50% of the population is genetically predisposed to tobacco and receives health and cognitive benefits from smoking. The other 50% are not. My health and mental acuity went quickly downhill when I once quit for 6 months. I was told that after 6 months I would be a new person. I was... dull witted, lethargic and prone to succumbing to every bug that came around.

So, I have made a lifestyle choice based on reading a great deal of suppressed research - and personal experience. I will smoke, no matter the legislation of the totalitarians and the whining of the PC do-gooders. In preparing for a possible worst case scenario, I began learning how to grow and cure my own organic tobacco. I will always respect the "rights" non-smokers. I will expect the same. I only regret that business owners are now forced into compliance with Big Brother's Hitlerian edict. There should be choices; smoking and non-smoking bars and restaurants.

Talk to my doctor? That's a laugh. The one chronic health problem that I do have (neurological) was caused by the AMA quacks and their toxic nostrums. It was only through the work of the founders of this website that I found an alternative cure for the problem. The medicos wanted to condemn me to a shortened lifetime requiring a somewhat medieval surgery about every 4 years or so. No thanks. My health is another item that I have taken into my own hands, and very glad that I did. I have lost a great many old friends in the past decade, due to the ignorance and the limitations of conventional medicine.These were all friends who trusted their doctors and died from relatively simple to cure bacterial infections contracted while in the hospital care of the medical profession, to whom they went for other problems.

A few years ago, just after his 98th birthday, and after much wrangling, we managed to talk my Grandad in to getting a complete physical checkup. He hadn't been to a doctor in 30 years.

He chewed tobacco, and he smoked 2 or 3 packs of cigarettes a day. He also loved his whiskey. And he could drink a fifth a day if you let him.

Upon hearing that he also liked his eggs at breakfast time smothered in extra bacon grease the young doctor was appalled. And he told my grandpa he needed to cut back on a few things; especially the smoking, and drinking.

Grandpa nodded his head thoughtfully, and simply said: “Yep! Young man, you’re probably right. I bet if I quite smokin’ an drinkin’, I just might live to a ripe old age.”

to listen to all these smokers justify such a filthy habit. Can you stop throwing your butts all over the ground and in the water as well as blowing your toxins my way? The butts aren't biodegradable in case you haven't noticed.
If you can find a corner somewhere where you get to re-ingest the gunk you spew out instead of imposing it on the rest of the planet, i support your right to smoke completely.
Now get real and start working on your addiction problems.

I agree statistics are or can be somewhat pliable or selective, anyway, not reliable.
The real question is whether there really are health risks associate with smoking.
To me and a lot of others, the hands-on experience of doctors and the personal experience of others leave no room for doubt that serious risks exist.
The number of people, the degree and type of illhealth, are variables.
The number of smokers who reach old age without debilitating health problems, is smaller than non-smokers, of this I am certain. Also, ask some-one who has stopped smoking if they FEEL any better!
Regardless of the truth of these matters, smokers still have a choice to take these risks.
If they pretend that there are no risks, they are gambling with their health IMHO. I realize they get a hard time from the cost point of view but I believe the anti-smoking measures are applied in good faith.
The other aspect, of great importance to non-smokers, is that there are real inconveniences and negative health triggers involved. Stale smoke becomes a putrid smell to non-smokers. A house, or worse, a car is objectionable. Public places, work places similarly become unpleasant to non-smokers. I have only met one smoker who carried a little lidded tin for his butts. All others, some worse than others, have a complete disregard for public and environment cleanliness.
I am sorry to be so oppositional, but my rights to clean air are legitimate. Your rights to contaminate have not been taken away, you are just getting a hard time. You must accept that you live, or die, with whatever restrictions are imposed. They are imposed for the good of everybody, including yourselves.

Recently a non-smoker told me, in contrast to other smokers I smell really good, he could only notice a slight smell of tobacco, but he wasn't disgusted. All those additives, chemicals, fragrances, etc. in cigarettes really make a difference to pure tobacco.

Yes, by the same pathocratic, deceptive and lying gobberment that installed the Patriot Act, that lied about 9/11, that spends over $2000 every minute of every day and night on wars of aggression and then speaks about peace out the other side of the forked tongue, that wants to curtail your access to certain sites on the Internet, that...........

("Methinks they protesteth too much").
I agree wholeheartedly with you that all the other examples you mention are propaganda or worse, lies. In the case of smoking, I truly believe it is detrimental to your health. However, us, or anybody, talking or arguing about it changes nothing. It's basically the smokers health that is being considered. I gave it up 30 years ago. Others can do what they like, why should I care? I just feel sorry that unnecessary health and side issues exist and loved ones get hurt. And it hurts me to see other people deluding themselves. Just let me have my opinion please, you guys can have yours. Ken.

In saying you smelt good, he was saying compared to other smokers. It is certainly good that whatever you smoke doesn't create an objectionable smell. But that is not the norm. If I have been just standing next to a smoker, after arriving home my clothes will still smell of smoke. Nothing personal but facts are facts.

My experience is that tobacco doesn't smell, what smells is commercial cigarettes. Whenever i receive a cigarette smoker at home, the smell stays. It doesn't happen with tobacco. It could be related to the chemical additives and addictives they put in cigarettes?

I quit smoking in '83. But one thing that remains the same: Everything I love is still killing me. I have no intention of starting up again. Cigarettes are too damned expensive.

But in point of fact, no body gets out of here alive. Sooner or later something is going to take me out. If I have a say in the matter, I would rather have it be true, that the thing that finally kills me is something I enjoy doing, than to have it be something I don't.

I've been wandering, and learning, all my live. I'm thinkin maybe some day, after I've learned all I can in one life, I'll drop this body like an old worn out sock, and wander of into the light.

Its almost more interesting the comments about the issue and the little stories about who how and where etc....there were one or two that actually mentioned the difference between tobacco and commercially produced tobacco...thats important...changes the whole nine yards and statistcs are like the analogy of the wine glass that is both half full, and consequently half empty.

People do what their heads say and that includes believing in God or smoking or war or whatever including un-reason.....its supposedly what modern hominids are all about, their diversity and crankiness...about survival and destruction.

So smoke on whilst the whole world falls apart around us, its no problem, equally no problem being smarter for being nicotine addicts as it is for being mari-j addicts I like your courage to stand up and essentially fight for what you (collectively) deem important..

It was at least at times, amusing to read you all, some more frequently than others - trolls inclusive!.